T.M. Kayode

Around March of 2020, I was about 7 months pregnant. I honestly don’t know why I keep tabs of months in my life in relation to how pregnant I was at the time. Lol. Anyway, the lockdown restrictions where been enforced in Nigeria; so, I was basically home – pregnant but I had this amazing burst of energy so I needed to actually work.

What immediately came to my mind was making progress in my PhD research. The last three months of 2019 was spent been heavily ill – I had a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum (I will gist this gist another time). January and February of 2020 went by – I am not even sure what happened but I didn’t make any progress in my research work. So, March was the month for me!

At that time, I decided to approach my research from another angle. I had done a good amount of literature review; I understood the research discourse. I knew my work was somewhere in the Mixed Integer Non-linear programming (MINLP) domain, I knew I was going to incorporate Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), I knew the kinds of data I needed, I had identified some data repositories…

Where I was a bit foggy was how I was going to actually model the MINLPs, like some research papers don’t even try. You would just start reading, you’d see methodology, next thing result. No explanation on how they moved from A to Z. I knew I needed to figure that bit out before the baby came.

Working Nights

The first step was endless googling. Also, I could only work majorly in the night from 11PM till sometimes 5AM. Then I’d go to bed and wake up whenever. I remember that researchgate was pretty helpful. Some of my questions had been answered and the answers provided were pretty insightful.

I also asked other Phd researcher friends and they asked their own Phd researcher friends and I got some answers that were similar to the ones I gleaned from googling. One of the recurring solutions I got was GAMS – General Algebraic Modeling System. So, I decided to check it out.

GAMS

I was able to navigate the website and downloaded the software easily. The learning curve was pretty standard. They have a lot of examples inbuilt that really help you understand. However, when I started the analysis, it kept returning an error message – the error message was a licensing error (Screenshot 1).

I didn’t really know what to do, so I decided to reach out to customer support. I think putting screenshots would make this more interesting. I sent the mail on April 13,2020 by 12:04 AM. Check Screenshot 2. I have to give GAMS customer support props – those guys are really prompt and helpful.

I got a response by April 14,2020 by 12:02AM. Check Screenshot 3. I was so overjoyed. It was a one-year license. Pretty cool, right!

Wrong! It Still did not work. I think I went to sleep after that.

I decided to send them another mail. Check out Screenshot 4.

They responded by April 16,2020 by 12:24AM. They asked me to send a snapshot with the error message, to which I sent Screenshot 1.

Ladies and Gentlemen, April 16, 2020 by 2:43PM. They sent Screenshot 5.

I was super overjoyed. Even though the license was for a month only. It was enough time to learn how to use it for my application properly. This post is basically a reflection on my Ph.D. journey and a shout-out to GAMS. I doubt they would ever see this but I am grateful for the support.

Lesson Takeaways

1. Keep pushing.
2. Ask questions.
3. Ask questions.

Stay tuned for Part 2.